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Not all rituals are successful. Some fail dismally, even painfully; some mercifully fade away. Some are rebelled against as empty formalities, undergone under duress, gleefully discarded when possible. These variations are useful for refining our theory, and for testing the conditions that make rituals operate. Unsuccessful rituals are important substantively as well, for if every social encounter of everyday life from the most minor up to the major public gatherings is to be put before the scale and weighed against the standard of ritual intensity, we would not expect ritual intensity to be the same everywhere. Since I am going to argue that life is structured around the contrast between successful, socially magnetic ritual situations with their high degree of emotion, motivation, and symbolic charge, and situations of lesser ritualism, it is necessary to sharpen our eyes as to what makes the difference between rituals that are strong and those that are weak. Individuals are attracted to the most intense ritual charges they can get, indifferent to lesser rituals, and repelled by others; we see best what is doing the attracting if we look at what is causing the indifference and the repulsion.

Failed rituals are easiest to see in the case of formal rituals, since there is a public announcement and widespread understanding that a ritual is being attempted. Then we shall cast a glance at natural rituals that fail: political or other gatherings that don’t click, demonstrations that don’t come off; and at the little Goffmanian rituals of everyday life that don’t work.

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In this respect, natural rituals fail for much the same reasons that formal rituals can be empty: the political crowd that mills around aimlessly, its members’ attention distracted to things happening outside the person making the speech or away from the enemy symbol to be confronted – individuals and little subgroups drifting away until those who are left are caught up in a deflationary emotion like rats leaving a sinking ship; the party that remains mired in little knots of perfunctory conversations and never builds up a collective effervescence. Here the missing ingredients are both a lack of shared attention – since duos are too fragmented from the larger group – and lack of a shared initial emotion that can be built up and transformed into a sense of collective participation. Low-intensity, perfunctory, or halting conversations exist in abundance, and in obvious contrast to those conversations that are engrossing. Although our normal form of attribution is to regard the conversations as indicators of the personalities one is encountering, these are situational outcomes that can be explained, as we shall later see in more detail, by the differing matchups of stocks of significant symbols to talk about, and by the level of synergy among the emotional energies of the parties to the conversational situation.

A nice contrast of successful and unsuccessful interaction rituals may be seen in the variety of New Year celebrations: some have a peak moment of genuine enthusiasm at the stroke of midnight (in this respect these celebrations are a mixture of traditional forms and natural, unscripted interactions) – while others consist in flat and prefunctory greetings for the new year. What makes the difference? My observation is that New Year celebrations that work are ones in which, in the hour or two before midnight, people in an assembled crowd start making noise – with the usual whistles, rattles, perhaps firecrackers – but above all making noises at each other, in their direction, better yet, in their face. This leads to entrainment; people start making noises and throwing streamers at each other, often breaking down barriers of acquaintanceship by drawing strangers into interaction. Notice that this interaction has no cognitive content; it is very much like small children running around and making noises at each other. In the context of the New Year celebration, this intruding noisily into someone else’s personal space, sometimes even bodily in the mild and playful form of throwing streamers or confetti at them, is taken as friendly and not hostile or deviant. This mutual entrainment in noise-making builds up to a crescendo of noise as everyone is focused on counting down the seconds to midnight; when the anticipated focal point is reached, there is a burst of solidarity gestures, people hugging and kissing each other, even strangers. Compare the more staid New Year party: Individuals continue in normal conversations, saying intelligible things. This keeps them in distinctive little pockets of shared mentality, cutting them off from a larger intersubjectivity that might encompass the whole group. Interactions have not been reduced to the lowest common denominator, as in the mutual noise-making ties; shared emotion does not build up; and the climax of the stroke of midnight is given only perfunctory acknowledgment, immediately after which many participants say they are tired and want to go home. Successful rituals are exhilarating failed rituals are energy draining.